MakeMyTrip Cuts Compute Costs by 22% with Amazon ECS, EKS

MakeMyTrip is the largest online travel aggregator in India, and is listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The company provides online travel services including tickets for flights, trains and buses, as well as domestic and international holiday packages and hotel reservations.

In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and countries’ borders started to close, MakeMyTrip saw traffic to its online travel platform slow to a crawl.

“Traffic to our online platform dropped drastically in the early months of the pandemic and we needed to optimize costs and reduce our spend on infrastructure,” said Jaipal Deswal, senior vice president, technology, MakeMyTrip India Pvt. Ltd. “We also needed to be able to scale up and down so we could become more agile and responsive as a business.”

The company utilized the microservices architecture powered by Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS) to save costs on its infrastructure while ensuring the platform could expand when demand increased.

Following the success of its lift and shift migration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018, MakeMyTrip selected AWS again for solutions that would be fast to scale and quick to deploy new services or features to market.

AWS recommended MakeMyTrip to migrate from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and use Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS as fully managed container orchestration services.

“As an AWS Enterprise Support customer, we received platinum-level of customer service with our transition. Sure, there were learning curves, but it was well worth it and we had 24x7 guidance and technical support on how we could optimize our platform for cost and operations,” Deswal said.

With the shift from a monolithic application to a microservice-based architecture, MakeMyTrip’s DevOps team could perform rolling deployments with zero downtime and easily manage load balancing. MakeMyTrip also automated its continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline to test functions anytime a new code is introduced without interrupting other services.

Migrating to Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS helped MakeMyTrip reduce costs like daily compute spend, while providing flexibility to scale up or down depending on service requirement.

“We saw 22 percent cost reduction from migrating our workloads from regular EC2-based model to docker based ECS and EKS,” Deswal said. “Plus, compared to EC2, we saw 20 percent improvement in spawning of new application instances on ECS and EKS, which allowed us to deploy and scale faster.”

MakeMyTrip also used AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers, to further reduce operational overhead of cluster management and removed the need for up to 25 percent buffer that would have been required to support blue-green deployment on AWS.

“With AWS, our DevOps teams are spending 50 percent less time managing clusters and infrastructure-level debugging, along with capacity audits,” Deswal said.

Looking ahead, MakeMyTrip plans to continue optimizing its software and data infrastructure with the support of AWS to enhance customers’ experiences on its platform.

“Our team will be spending 20 percent of our time every quarter to see how we can further optimize our applications and deployments,” Deswal said. “We had a steep learning curve moving to the new platform, but we achieved it and will continue to improve, thanks to the technical account manager and AWS support teams every step of the way.”